A Look at Inequality in Sports Pt. II
- Feb 6, 2020
- 6 min read
Would you believe me if I told you that women have been barred from participating in sports for so long because people think our uteruses will fall out? That was a genuine, commonly held belief not too long ago, and it baffles me.
Don’t believe me? Per olympic.org, sexism in sports is rampant and was especially prominent in the 1928 800m dash. Anita DeFrantz, vice-president of the International Olympic Committee in 1997, commented on the “controversy” of the 1928 games: “The administrators, members of the IOC and the media apparently had decided that women were too frail to compete in a race as long as 800 meters. As a result, the reports from the 1928 Games not only distorted the results of that race but in some cases completely fabricated facts to support their viewpoint.”
One such author, John Tunis, who was a prominent sportswriter back then, described the racers as “11 wretched women, 5 of whom dropped out before the finish, while 5 collapsed after reaching the tape.” The author was even ballsy enough to say: “This distance makes too great a call on feminine strength.”
The kicker? Only nine women competed in that race. There’s plenty of film and photographs to prove there were nine competitors. Additionally, all of the women finished the race with the winner, Lina Radke, setting a world record. Obviously, these women are going to be exhausted and lay down after racing their hearts out, but let’s focus on how tired they are because they’re so weak.
Also, “wretched women?” Is this the precursor of “nasty woman”?
The press chose to focus on certain aspects to display to the public to further their own biases. Sound familiar? A classic case of agenda-setting.
This writer and all the others like him used a specific type of agenda-setting called framing. Citing from Miles’ book once more, he goes in-depth on how framing plays out in the media:
“Framing is an essential part of agenda-setting theory (Zhou & Moy, 2007). Entman (1993) described framing as essentially involving both selection and salience. Framing means selecting aspects of a perceived reality and making them more salient to the audience in such a way that it promotes (1) a particular issue definition, (2) a specific causal interpretation, (3) a certain moral evaluation, and (4) a recommended solution (Entman). Framing an issue makes it more salient. Salience means to make an issue more noticeable, meaningful, or memorable to audiences (Entman). Increasing the salience of an issue enhances the probability that people will perceive the issue and believe that the issue is important and meaningful to them, thus making them more likely to mentally process the issue and remember it (Fiske & Taylor, 1991).”*
So the press decided to focus on the women resting after the run to portray them as weak and to maintain sports as a gentlemanly endeavor. Then, with multiple newspapers covering the story, the public was led to believe that this is a genuine issue and think of women as the weaker sex.
Can you get more textbook? These falsified claims prevented women from participating in any activity longer than a 200-meter race for 32 years!
But that was 1928. Surely things have gotten better, right? Oh you sweet summer child, absolutely not.
Fast forward to 1967, Boston, Massachusetts.
In 1967, Kathrine Switzer became the first woman ever to finish the Boston Marathon, but leading up to that amazing accomplishment she had been told that a woman could never run the race. Even her coach at the time argued that a woman couldn’t do it despite her running 10 miles a night.
After practicing for months, Switzer was finally ready. She recalls the moment she and her coach first did their 26-mile practice run on her website katherineswitzer.com:
“Three weeks before the marathon, Arnie and I ran our 26-mile trial. As we came down our home stretch, it felt too easy, so I suggested that we run another five-mile loop just to feel extra confident about Boston. Arnie agreed, reluctantly. Toward the end of our 31-mile run, he began turning grey. When we finished, I hugged him ecstatically—and he passed out cold.”
One of these people had already run the marathon 15 times, and it wasn’t Switzer.
Though she had overall received support from friends and family alike, Switzer was harassed and targeted during the race simply for being a woman. The race director actually attempted to push her off the course and take her running bib.
Well, that was the 60’s you say. Things are better now. Right?
Nope! While I’ve only covered running so far, this mindset of women being fragile is widespread. Take, for instance, ski jumping.
In 2005, president of the International Ski Federation, Gian-Franco Kasper, made a rather scathing comment that “[ski jumping] seems not to be appropriate for ladies from a medical point of view” and that there are not very many of them who are talented. Kasper did eventually retract his statement, but the mindset was still prevalent in ski jumping.
IOC president Jacque Rogge (2010) stated that women just weren’t good enough.
"If you have three medals, with 80 athletes competing on a regular basis, internationally, the percentage of medal winners is extremely high," Rogge said. "In any other sport, you are speaking about hundreds of thousands, if not tens of millions of athletes, at a very high level, competing for one single medal.
Just another example of men thinking women are lesser and the media not covering the sport. I don’t think I can make this any more obvious.
Okay, so we’ve got explicit discrimination in 1928, 1967, 2005, and 2010. We’re done now with these crappy opinions. Science has backed up that woman would be fine in sports, yeah? So why are we still talking about this?
Let me show you exhibit A:
“I’m not a fan of women’s ski jumping. It’s a pretty difficult sport with a high risk of injury. If a man gets a serious injury, it’s still not fatal, but for women, it could end up more seriously. Women have another purpose — to have children, to do housework, to create hearth and home.” —Alexander Arefyev, Russian men’s ski jump coach.
Who wants to go to Russia with me to show Arefyev just how warm women can be?
This was in 2014.
Women’s ski jump wasn’t introduced into the Olympics until 2014 because of the idea that it was dangerous to women’s health.
2014, people! This crap is still happening!
In Newsweek’s article “Women at the Winter Olympics Have Always Had Fewer Chances to Compete”, they spoke with Dr. Ellen Casey — the attending sports medicine doctor at the Hospital for Special Surgery who specializes in sports medicine for women:
“There’s really no evidence that the uterus itself is damaged from impact or running or anything like that. The idea that ‘women just aren’t built for sports’ — that is unfounded,” Dr. Casey commented.
The article goes on to discuss the physical differences in men and women’s bodies such as women being more flexible on average and men having denser bones.
According to the Washington Post, this happens a lot. It’s actually gone so far as women’s sports being eliminated altogether from competitions because people feared the women may suffer from “infertility” or “premature aging.”
You can also see this in the earlier comment from Arefyev. Clearly, he has some very strong beliefs about women and their roles. These men have this mindset that women are weaker and are meant to be caretakers. They have a specific idea in place and the way they perceive and interact with the world is shaped by that belief.
These misinformed beliefs have stuck around for years. It wasn’t until 2008 that women got all of their events back. And there was evidence suggesting that women were becoming more athletic and quickly gaining on the men despite not being allowed to partake in the events.
In a 1992 paper by two UCLA physiologists — “Will women soon outrun men?” — the two graphed out men's and women’s records and found that the improvement of women over time was significantly steeper than men’s. This led them to theorize that women would quickly surpass men in the first half of the 21st century.
Biological differences account for the massive differences in performance. On average, men are heavier and taller than women. Their limbs are longer, they have bigger hearts and lungs, more muscle mass. They’ve also got narrower hips which are more efficient for running.
That’s on average though. That’s not to say that there are women out there who can easily outperform their male counterparts. And to suggest that just because, on average, women don’t perform as well in certain sports then men, that they are somehow lesser is outrageous.
Men growing up believing that women succeeding in sports is an affront to their talent is just sad. Are you that insecure in your ability that a woman beating you is offensive? If you can’t handle the competition, go find something else to do.
So it’s important to acknowledge that physical differences between men and women exist, but you also have to acknowledge that women are in no way inferior to men in sports because of their physical differences.
To properly move through this life, you have to check your viewpoints. As noted in my first post, the idea of women being weaker is everywhere.
Understand that this view has been shaped by the media and begin to unlearn it or else you’ll be as crusty as Coach Arefyev.
So keep this in mind when reading my next article because I’ll be discussing the pay gap. You think these first two articles were feminist propaganda? Just wait! The best is yet to come!
*Jeffrey Allen Miles, Jossey-Bass. (2012). Management and Organization Theory: A Jossey-Bass Reader. Ch 4
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